Читать книгу Tuesday Falling - S. Williams - Страница 12

The DS taps at her keyboard and the scene backs up a few frames, and then freezes at the place where the girl is smiling up at the camera. Loss can feel a pressure building in his stomach and quietly belches; his hand in front of his mouth. The room fills with the smell of bacon fat. It makes him feel nauseous. More nauseous.

‘The cameras outside the station?’ he asks, reaching inside his jacket for some antacid tablets. His DS indicates the split-screen on her laptop, showing the CCTV views of the entrance to Embankment tube station, where all the passengers had to disembark after the emergency cord was pulled on the train.

‘Nothing, sir. According to the cameras she never left the station. She walked through those boys as if she was some sort of ghost ninja and then …’, she makes a throwing away gesture with her hands, ‘puff, disappeared.’

The DI continues looking at the girl on the screen. She couldn’t be more than seventeen. ‘And how many of those fine young men did she kill?’

‘Amazingly, only one. The leader.’ The DS taps a few keys. ‘One Jason Dunne from Sparrow Close, Crossquays.’

‘Lovely.’ Sparrow Close was well known to DI Loss. If one took a sink estate, an estate so deprived of government investment, but so rich in monies from drugs and stolen goods, and then dumped a load of stone-cold bastards in it, you’d have Sparrow Close.

‘Although none of the others will walk again,’ continues his DS. ‘She sliced their Achilles tendons and cut through the hamstrings behind the knee.’

The DS stops looking at her laptop and turns to face him. ‘Actually, she did more than that but I don’t want to think about it.’

Loss doesn’t blame her. All the blood in front of him on the screen is starting to make him light-headed. Even though on the monitor it’s not in colour, it’s in colour in his head, and it’s turned up to full-tilt. ‘And what was it she put on his body?’ he asks

She turns back to her laptop and starts tapping, her fingers hammering at the keys, and the screen is filled with a close-up of the body of Jason Dunne. Lying on his jeans, stuck onto them with blood, is a piece of white card, like a business card. Typed in Ariel font is one word: Tuesday. The DI sighs heavily.

‘And is it?’

‘Is it what, sir?’

‘Tuesday.’

Stone smiles tightly, staring at the image on the screen.

‘No, sir. It’s Friday.’